FRED-S (which is publicly available) and FRED (a larger database available for analysis at the University of Freiburg) are monolingual spoken-language dialect corpora. FRED-S contains full-length interviews with native speakers from the Southwest of England, the Southeast of England, the Midlands, the North of England, and the Scottish Lowlands. The texts reflect the 'traditional' varieties of British English spoken in these areas during the second half of the 20th century. The corpus consists of sound recordings and orthographic transcripts. These transcripts have been enriched with part of speech tags. FRED-S is based on 121 interviews with 144 dialect speakers totalling 123 hours of recorded speech. This translates into about one million words of running text.

The data originate from so-called oral history projects where informants were interviewed to record their life memories. All texts are face-to-face conversations between (usually) one interviewer and an informant in a private environment (in most cases the speaker's home). The interviewers were native speakers themselves and, although the interviewees knew they were being recorded, the setting and the interest expressed in their life stories helped to sufficiently distract them from their own linguistic behaviour.

A limited set of sociolinguistic variables is specified for each text (geographic data, and - often - age and sex of the speaker). Most informants are so-called NORMs - non-mobile old rural males - who typically left school at age fourteen or younger. The ratio of running text produced by male speakers to running text produced by female speakers is roughly 74:26 (with 87 male and 52 female informants in total). About three quarters of the overall textual material in FRED-S is produced by male speakers.

The primary aim of compiling the FRED corpus series was the research group's interest in morphosyntactic variation in British English dialects and the lack of geographically well-balanced, easy-to-access, machine-readable databases. Morphosyntactic phenomena subject to analysis have included the following: relativization (Herrmann, 2003, 2005), pronoun usage (Wagner, 2004a,b, 2005, Hernández 2010), verbal agreement (Pietsch, 2005a,b), morphosyntactic persistence (Szmrecsanyi, 2005, 2006), genitive variation (Szmrecsanyi & Hinrichs 2008), complementation (Kolbe 2008), non-standard verbal morphology (Anderwald 2009), and modal verbs (Schulz 2010). Szmrecsanyi (2008) features a dialectometrical analysis of aggregate grammatical variation in FRED.

The FRED corpus series has been compiled by the research group 'English Dialect Syntax from a Typological Perspective', based at the English Department of the University of Freiburg and supervised by Bernd Kortmann. A corpus manual is available at http://www.freidok.uni-freiburg.de/volltexte/2859/.

References:

Anderwald, Lieselotte (2009). The Morphology of English Dialects: Verb-Formation in Non-Standard English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hernández, Nuria (2010). "Personal pronouns in the dialects of England: A corpus-driven study of grammatical variation in spontaneous speech". PhD-thesis, University of Freiburg.

Herrmann, Tanja (2003). "Relative clauses in dialects of English. A typological Approach". PhD-thesis, University of Freiburg (available online at http://www.freidok.uni-freiburg.de/volltexte/830/).

Herrmann, Tanja (2005). "Relative clauses in English dialects of the British Isles". In: A Comparative Grammar of British English Dialects: Agreement, Gender, Relative Clauses, Kortmann, Bernd, Tanja Herrmann, Lukas Pietsch & Susanne Wagner (eds.). pp. 21-124. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Kolbe, Daniela (2008). "Complement Clauses in British Englishes". PhD-thesis, University of Trier.

Pietsch, Lukas (2005)a. ""Some do and some doesn't": Verbal concord variation in the north of the British Isles". In: A Comparative Grammar of British English Dialects: Agreement, Gender, Relative Clauses, Kortmann, Bernd, Tanja Herrmann, Lukas Pietsch & Susanne Wagner (eds.). pp. 125-210. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Pietsch, Lukas (2005)b. Variable Grammars: Verbal Agreement in Northern Dialects of English. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Schulz, Monika Edith (2010). "Morphosyntactic variation in British English dialects: Evidence from possession, obligation and past habituality". PhD-thesis, University of Freiburg.

Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt (2005). "Language users as creatures of habit: a corpus-linguistic analysis of persistence in spoken English". Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 1(1): 113-149.

Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt (2006). Morphosyntactic Persistence in Spoken English: A Corpus Study at the Intersection of Variationist Sociolinguistics, Psycholinguistics, and Discourse Analysis. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt & Lars Hinrichs (2008). "Probabilistic determinants of genitive variation in spoken and written English: a multivariate comparison across time, space, and genres". In: The Dynamics of Linguistic Variation: Corpus Evidence on English Past and Present, Nevalainen, Terttu, Irma Taavitsainen, Päivi Pahta & Minna Korhonen (eds.). pp 291-309. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt (2008). Corpus-based dialectometry: aggregate morphosyntactic variability in British English dialects. International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, 2(1-2): 279-296.

Wagner, Susanne (2004)a. "Gender in English Pronouns". PhD-thesis, University of Freiburg (available online at http://freidok.ub.uni-freiburg.de/volltexte/1412/).

Wagner, Susanne (2004)b. "'Gendered' pronouns in English dialects - a typological perspective". In: Dialectology Meets Typology, Kortmann, Bernd (ed.). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Wagner, Susanne (2005). "Gender in English pronouns: Southwest England". In: A Comparative Grammar of British English Dialects: Agreement, Gender, Relative Clauses. Kortmann, Bernd, Tanja Herrmann, Lukas Pietsch & Susanne Wagner (eds.). pp. 211-367. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.